Reports of Patient Payments

The Patient Account is a listing of all the payments made by the patient as well as a list of all the debits for encounters that the patient is responsible to pay. For a full explanation of the Patient Account, refer to the chapter title Patient Accounts.

There are several events that will add money to the patient account:

1. A patient is required to pay their co-pay at the time of the encounter.
2. A bill is sent to the patient and in response, the patient submits a payment to the practice.
3. An amount is transferred into the patient account from another account.

There are couple events that will remove money to the patient account:

1. Payments for an encounter that are specified by an EOP.
2. An amount transferred out of a patient account and into another patient account.

The Patient Payment Report is a report that will summarize a range of payments. The payments are a summary of income from patients and can be used to generate daily, weekly, or monthly summaries. The report can also be tailored to generate cash, check, or charge only incomes. All of these reports are available through TFM. Every practice must decide the frequency of these reports and which ones they need to generate.

When you select the button Generate Summary of Patient Payments from the Reports dialog, the Patient Payment List dialog appears. (as seen below)

There are several sections to the Patient Payment List dialog. The first section labeled List Filters is displayed on the right. The filters are used to select the desired payments from all the payments in TFM. The payments that match the filter criteria are listed in the table.

The filters that can be used include:

• Start Date - the date used to match payment dates. If there isn't an End Date specified then only payments for this date are listed. If there is an End Date specified then this is the first date in a range of dates.
• End Date - the date used to match payment dates that are between Start Date and the End Date. If no Start Date is specified then this data is ignored.
• Method - the method of payment. Options are cash, check or charge.
• Check Number - an individual check

Once the desired filters have been set, select the Create Filtered List button and the payments that match the filter criteria will be listed in the table. In the example, two patients that made cash payments are listed. Also notice the total number of patients listed in the table is displayed in text above the table.

The total of all the payments in the table is displayed under the table. In this example there were two payments that totaled $65.00.

Once the table contains the desired list, a report can be generated. By default the report will be written to the Reports directory specified in the TFM preferences. The default name of the file that will be created is PatientPayments.pdf. The name of the file can be changed by editing the name shown in this text box. If it is desired to create a sequence of reports, it is necessary to change the name of the file each time to keep from over-writing the previous report.